Evidence from Measuring Community Flood Resilience in Asia

Disaster risk and subsequent loss and damage in Asia are increasing at an alarming rate, threatening socioeconomic gains. Arresting this rapid increase in exposure requires risk-informed development and urban planning—a challenging proposition complicated by multiple economic and political incentives. To reduce these risks, action at the national and regional levels must be complemented by action at the community level. Measuring community disaster resilience can help lead to novel and systemic investments that build community resilience. Our analysis of community flood resilience data finds deficiencies and potential for substantial improvements in community flood resilience investment across the region, with different recommendations for urban, peri-urban, and rural locations. Our evidence from case studies shows that interventions prioritized by the measurementinformed process are more likely to succeed and be sustainable and have co-benefits for community development

Flood resilience measurement for communities: data for science and practice

Given the increased attention put on strengthening disaster resilience, there is a growing need to invest in its measurement and the overall accountability of resilience strengthening initiatives. There is a major gap in evidence about what actually makes communities more resilient when an event occurs, because there are no empirically validated measures of disaster resilience. Similarly, an effort to identify operational indicators has gained some traction only more recently. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework and associated, fully operational, integrated tool takes a systems-thinking, holistic approach to serve the dual goals of generating data on the determinants of community flood resilience, and providing decision-support for on-the-ground investment. The FRMC framework measures “sources of resilience” before a flood happens and looks at the post-flood impacts afterwards. It is built around the notion of five types of capital (the 5Cs: human, social, physical, natural, and financial) and the 4Rs of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity). The sources of resilience are graded based on Zurich’s Risk Engineering Technical Grading Standard. Results are displayed according to the 5Cs and 4Rs, the disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, themes and context level, to give the approach further flexibility and accessibility. The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) has identified the measurement of resilience as a valuable ingredient in building community flood resilience. In the first application phase (2013-2018), we measured flood resilience in 118 communities across nine countries, building on responses at household and community levels. Continuing this endeavor in the second phase (2018 – 2023) will allow us to enrich the understanding of community flood resilience and to extend this unique data set. We find that at the community level, the FRMC enables users to track community progress on resilience over time in a standardized way. It thus provides vital information for the decision-making process in terms of prioritizing the resilience-building measures most needed by the community. At community and higher decision-making levels, measuring resilience also provides a basis for improving the design of innovative investment programs to strengthen disaster resilience. By exploring data across multiple communities (facing different flood types and with very different socioeconomic and political contexts), we can generate evidence with respect to which characteristics contribute most to community disaster resilience before an event strikes. This contributes to meeting the challenge of demonstrating that the work we do has the desired impact – that it actually builds resilience. Our findings suggest that stronger interactions between community functions induce co-benefits for community development

A typology of community flood resilience

Flood risk is increasing worldwide and there is a growing need to better understand the co-benefits of investments in disaster resilience. Utilizing a multinational community flood resilience dataset, this paper takes a systems approach to understanding community-level flood resilience. Using a cluster analysis and bivariate correlation methods, we develop a typology of community flood resilience capacity based on community characteristics and five capitals (human, financial, natural, physical, and social). Our results reinforce the importance of context-specific policymaking and give recommendations of four distinct clusters to investigate the relationship between flood resilience and prevailing development conditions. We especially find that communities with higher interactions between their capital capacities tend to have higher flood resilience levels. Additionally, there are indications that stronger interactions between community capacities can help to induce multiple co-benefits when investing in disaster resilience. Our results also have important policy implications on the individual community level. For example, based on our results, we suggest that communities with lower flood resilience capacities and interactions can best build resilience on leveraging their relatively higher human capital capacities to strengthen the financial and social capitals. Negative effects might happen for urban communities when co-benefits of natural and physical capital are not fully integrated. The highest flood resilience capacity is found in communities with a well-balanced household income distribution which is likely a contributing factor to the importance of financial capital for this cluster. Our results emphasize the importance of an integrative approach to management when implementing systematic flood disaster resilience metrics and development measures

Resilience and the Transformation of Food and Land Use Systems. Discussion paper prepared for the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU)

The transformation of food and land use systems has been recognized in its central importance of attaining sustainable development paths. Recent shocks and crises events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war and protracted conflicts, weather and climate extremes, have revealed the vulnerabilities of the current food and land use systems architecture. To secure long-term development gains, the resilience of food and land use systems needs to be strengthened. Reflecting on the evolution of resilience concepts, we argue that resilience building efforts must be seen as an integral part of sustainability transformations of food and land use systems. Resilience should not be understood as a static but as a dynamic, iterative process, which combines elements of absorptive, coping, adaptive and transformative capacities and is evaluated over time in its effectiveness to ensure continuous functionality of food and land use systems in times of rapid change. Here we offer a number of considerations for building resilience into food and land use systems in a dynamic world

Fiscal resilience challenged

The GAR Risk Atlas contributes to unveiling the hidden risk in national economies and their urban centres. Building on a multi-year effort by a consortium of leading scientific institutions coordinated by UNISDR, it provides a global vision of where and how disaster risk can undermine development. It estimates the probability of future disaster losses in the built environment for five major hazards (earthquakes, tsunamis, riverine floods, and tropical cyclones - winds and storm surge) and for every country and territory in the world and represents the results using robust risk metrics such as Average Annual Loss (AAL) and Probable Maximum Loss (PML). The GAR Risk Atlas (special report of the GAR series) presents the fully updated results of the global risk assessment in a visually appealing and innovative manner

Quantifying community resilience to riverine hazards in Bangladesh

Every year, 30–70% of Bangladesh is inundated with flood waters, which combined with erosion, affect between 10 and 70 million people annually. Rural riverine communities in Bangladesh have long been identified as some of the poorest populations, most vulnerable to riverine hazards. However, these communities have, for generations, also developed resilience strategies – considered as the combination of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative approaches – to manage significant flooding and erosion. It is not clear whether such existing strategies are sufficient to generate resilience in the face of increasing hazards and growing pressures for land. In this study, we quantify community resilience to flooding and erosion of 35 of the most poverty-stricken and exposed communities in riverine Bangladesh by applying the systematic resilience measurement framework provided by the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities tool. The low levels of resilience observed in the riverine communities, as well as their continued focus on enhancing absorptive capacities are alarming, especially in the face of growing climate threats and continued population growth. Innovative transformative responses are urgently required in riverine Bangladesh, which align with and complement ongoing community-centred efforts to enhance rural resilience to riverine hazards

Use, microbiological effectiveness and health impact of a household water filter intervention in rural Rwanda-A matched cohort study.

Unsafe drinking water is a substantial health risk contributing to child diarrhoea. We investigated impacts of a program that provided a water filter to households in rural Rwandan villages. We assessed drinking water quality and reported diarrhoea 12-24 months after intervention delivery among 269 households in the poorest tertile with a child under 5 from 9 intervention villages and 9 matched control villages. We also documented filter coverage and use. In Round 1 (12-18 months after delivery), 97.4% of intervention households reported receiving the filter, 84.5% were working, and 86.0% of working filters contained water. Sensors confirmed half of households with working filters filled them at least once every other day on average. Coverage and usage was similar in Round 2 (19-24 months after delivery). The odds of detecting faecal indicator bacteria in drinking water were 78% lower in the intervention arm than the control arm (odds ratio (OR) 0.22, 95% credible interval (CrI) 0.10-0.39, p<0.001). The intervention arm also had 50% lower odds of reported diarrhoea among children <5 than the control arm (OR=0.50, 95% CrI 0.23-0.90, p=0.03). The protective effect of the filter is also suggested by reduced odds of reported diarrhoea-related visits to community health workers or clinics, although these did not reach statistical significance